


a lifetime supply of anastacia beverly hills cosmetics

by dadvans



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Drag Queens, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-05
Updated: 2018-02-05
Packaged: 2019-03-13 23:01:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13580757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dadvans/pseuds/dadvans
Summary: Sidney’s full drag name is Gordie Howe Hatricia Tricks, but you can call her Hatricia.(A Rupaul's Drag Race AU)





	a lifetime supply of anastacia beverly hills cosmetics

**Author's Note:**

> look, this literally came to me in a dream. all praise, thanks and blame goes to [verity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/verity) for cheerleading and the amazing beta job.

The first time Sidney meets Zhenya he can’t believe that she dresses down into Geno, sleepy Twiggy eyes and eyelashes removed to reveal a droopy-faced Russian boy with a thick-lipped, dopey pout. And then he gets to know Geno and can’t believe that he can get his shoulders down from his ears long enough to pose in a dress on a runway.

“I thought you were going to be like, a comedy queen,” Sidney admits over his shoulder one night early into the competition, makeup wipe number 500 balled up in his fist, covered in bronzer. Geno looks back at him in the mirror.

“You think I'm funny?” Geno asks, achingly genuine.

“Maybe funny looking,” Sasha shouts across the workroom. The camera crew circles them like sharks. A few of the girls offer half-hearted scandalized _oooh_ ’s under their breath, but it’s a weak read and even Sasha knows it. Whatever gets her camera time, Sidney assumes, since Geno told him day one that they both came from the same underground club scene in Brighton Beach and have some kind of unspoken rivalry.

“It probably my storyline,” Geno had said on day one, pins in his mouth making him even harder to decipher than usual as he stitched together an evening gown out of a few deconstructed throw pillows. “Until I kick her ass and bad contour out in semi-final. Then my storyline be I win.”

Geno isn’t funny looking. Okay, he sort of is. He looks like a handsome, real life Eeyore-faced fuckboy out of drag, and in drag he looks like a Russian ice queen who could, for a hot second, make Sidney second-guess his sexuality.

“I’m not funny looking,” Geno says, snapping his fingers at Sasha behind him. “I’m glamazon.”

 

 

Sidney’s dreams of becoming a professional hockey player are shattered along with his legs in an accident that happens the year he’s playing hockey at Shattuck. A rough tussle with some shitheads sends him over a second-story railing and a week later he’s still doped up to his eyeballs in the ICU as they try to figure out how to piece all of his broken parts back together.

Opiates make Sidney feel like the world is ending. It’s not his first rodeo with a morphine drip, but it is the longest, and it is the one time that his world is _truly_ ending. When he starts to come back to himself after a few days, he finds out that he’s been told his hockey career is over before it started, and his reaction has been largely to tell his parents, visiting friends, and the twenty-odd doctors and nurses that have been taking care of him that he is probably gay and very, very scared about being left alone in the same room with his identity now that he can’t have hockey.

“I said that?” Sidney aks, dry cotton mouth making his voice creak like a door opening in a haunted house. Nausea spirals faintly in his stomach, coils up the back of his throat.

“Yeah,” Jack replies, offering him an ice chip from a white, plastic cup.

“Well,” Sidney says. “Shit."

 

 

“So, what kind of edit do you think you’ll get, Hatricia,” asks actual human Swedish Roll Nicky St. Nick. He’s got his feet in Sasha’s lap on Sidney’s bed and is painting his toenails a dark forest green. Sidney looks at all of them--Sasha, Nicky, Geno, Mary Ann Flower, Tangerine--over his shoulder where they’ve huddled on his bed for the Panthers-Islanders playoff game.

“Edit?” he asks, eyebrows raised. He’s got a moisturizing face mask on and probably looks terrifying.

“Yeah, like, who shady queen?” Sasha asks, stroking the bottom of one of Nicky’s feet with his thumb. Sasha Dynamo is all cheekbones and shark smile, even when he’s in Boy Mode, and Sidney still can’t tell if he’s genuine or just a huge fucking bitch. “Who face queen? Who fishy queen?”

“Jamie Bennett-Ramsay,” everyone but Sidney replies in an almost bored unison to the last question.

“I don’t know,” Sidney says, turning back to the TV with the remote, still skipping through the channels. “I kind of just hope that the show will just capture who I am.”

Tanger laughs, and Sasha says, “okay, _Boring Queen_ ,” to which Sidney replies, “hey, you assholes are in _my room_.”

Sidney didn’t come into the competition expecting to make friends, and he certainly didn’t expect half of the queens sneaking from balcony to balcony behind the producer’s backs to get to his room to watch a hockey game after a day of filming, but here they all are.

“Sasha, don’t have to be catty when cameras aren't here,” Zhenya complains, Geno complains, because he said Sidney could call him that like it was a secret. His t-shirt is so tight across his chest, a sliver of soft stomach where the hem has rolled up as he lays on Sidney’s bed sideways. He’s so tall his feet hang off the edge, ratty tube socks loose on his waxed legs a far cry from the glamorous bitch who did high kicks in fuck me pumps during rehearsal earlier in the day. It’s still hard to fathom that so many guys here out of drag are kind of bros , and more horrifically, Sidney’s type. He needs a distraction. “Watch game, be nice.”

Sasha laughs a little and it looks like he’s about to say something else when they’re all interrupted by someone knocking from the outside of the sliding balcony door. Sidney gets up a little too quick and pulls the curtain back to reveal Miss BizNasty outside holding up a dub sack and handle of vodka. Sidney steps to the side and lets him in.

“Hey, sluts! Guess who blew room service so we can get high!” Biz says, stepping inside, and everyone cheers.

“In the bathroom!” Sidney calls after him. Nicky is already going through Sidney’s bedside table to pull out the hotel Bible for rolling papers. “I don’t want hotel staff complaining to the producers and get kicked off the show because they smelled weed in my room.”

“Yes, Mama Hat Tricks,” Biz says, kissing him on the cheek before falling into the welcome arms of Tanger and Flower.

The entire scene reminds Sidney of his first year at UCLA, when he was still trying to figure out who he was off the ice; years of laser focus and self-discipline were slowly stripped away until he had to ask himself what the fuck he was doing and who the fuck he was protecting himself from by keeping the rest of his life at arm’s length. He had felt so old then after years in and out of the spotlight and then the hospital, wearing the weight of his own expectations along with the rest of the world’s. He had never let himself kiss another boy before then. He’d never let himself get high on his own accord and cry it out or drink too much and puke at a party. His highest heels were a pair of ice skates. And even then, he had still been trying to figure out how hockey could fit into his life--if he would go into sports journalism, or sports medicine? He didn’t know how to be independent, what it would look or feel like to be completely himself.

His first confrontation with vulnerability had been ugly and awkward, but then there had been boys dressed as girls who kissed mean, funny things into his mouth at the back of bars and pressed joints to his lips in bed early mornings because neither of them knew how to talk about their feelings otherwise. It had been terrifying, and exhilarating, and eventually he realized, fun. Horrifically, awfully, skin-peeled-back-going-200-down-the-highway fun.

He sees the girls on his bed, Geno taking a pull straight from the handle, his adam’s apple bobbing like a promise, and this is what Sidney thinks of.

 

 

Sidney’s drag name is Gordie Howe Hatricia Tricks, but you can call her Hatricia for short. It was a name he came up with during the weird summer Jack flew from Michigan to visit, the same summer where Sidney had been loitering in the shadows of West Hollywood gay bars, nervously drinking shitty beer and hooking up with guys twice his age in the darkest possible corners until legendary kitty girl, the Virgin Mother Maria from the Haus of Lemieux herself had found him and taken him under her wing. Sidney had maybe worn pantyhose three times and loved it, loved the way it covered the scar tissue on his legs and the way guys would tear at the seam down his ass just to fuck him in a dress. It felt like a uniform, like hockey. This is what he told Jack.

“Gay,” Jack had supplied, helpfully.

“Thanks,” Sidney had said.

“You’re welcome,” Jack replied. Even if Sidney had been weird about his own sexuality from the beginning, Jack never was. He had been the one Sidney took to the places that Sidney was the most ashamed of, would never ask but question Jack out of the corner of his eye, straw in his mouth to keep him from saying, _is this okay? Am I okay?_ “What about ‘Penalty Box’? But with three x’s and you have to pronounce it PENAL-tee.”

“Get out of my life,” Sidney told him, finishing the rest of his vodka tonic.

“I’m just trying to be helpful, but that’s okay,” Jack said. “I want to be supportive.”

When Sidney was young, the best way that anyone could be supportive was by explicitly ignoring anything personal about himself and just pretend he was normal.

“Aren’t you afraid of being seen?” Sidney asked, a little bit quieter. Jack had actually laughed.

“How dare you, Hatricia Tricks,” Jack had replied. “What kind of friend do you think I’ve been for the past six years?”

Sidney had looked at him sourly. “The worst kind of friend.”

 

 

Sidney was sure he had been scouted because of his social media. He wasn’t really a club queen like Maria, he didn’t host weekly stage shows like Flower, but he was well known enough in the circuit to be a face. People knew who Hatricia Tricks was. She had a couple hundred-thousand followers on instagram. They stopped her in the club, in greasy diners at three A.M. when she was having post-show breakfast with a few other girls in Montreal or whenever the fuck at Norm’s where she would be coaxed into a drag brunch at Hamburger Mary’s. The foundation of Hatricia Tricks’ brand was there, a pretty girl who wanted to be more than just a stepford wife ballroom queen.

It’s not like he doesn’t think he can win now that he’s here and can see the landscape of his competition-- he can outsew just about every bitch in the game and he’s fucking gorgeous. But he can see his weaknesses a lot clearer in the strengths of his competitors. Both Nicky St. Nick and Titty Sequins have dance backgrounds, Sasha Dynamo is aggressively, meanly funny with a thick callus around her heart; Zhenya is funny in her own stupid way that’s only more endearing when combined with her vampy slut persona, and Tanger is candidly fearless in a way Sidney has never known how to be. He’s going to need more than just his body to win the crown.

“You’re doing fine, mon cher,” Flower tells him kind of dismissively as they ride back to the hotel in one of the studio’s Escalades. “You’ve been in the top for the past two challenges.”

Sidney hasn’t, he’s been safe, but Flower was in the bottom two tonight and had to lip sync for his life. It should probably make him feel more secure, but it doesn’t-- he saw Flower absolutely come for and drag another girl with a kind of fire that Sidney isn’t sure he’d be able to conjure up with the same desperation, and that’s frightening. He doesn’t say anything else, because Flower seems to still be a little fragile, shaky and hollowed out from the win, so he just bites the inside of his cheek

“Besides,” Flower continues, “the producers would never send you home with the story you have going on right now.”

“Story?” Sidney repeats. He puts his forehead against the cool glass of the window and looks up at the orange streetlights that border the Anaheim streets and block out the stars. He thinks about Sasha asking him about the edit he was going for, what kind of queen he was, things he had never thought about before the competition that now swarm around him like a sea he feels lost in. “I don’t have a story.”

“ _Bitch_ ,” Flower says accusingly, bumping his knee into Sidney’s like Sidney is being coy or some shit. Sidney looks back at him, eyes wide like, _what?_ And Flower just laughs. “Okay, okay. You can play dumb, it’ll make better TV anyway if you don’t see it coming.”

“See what coming?” Sidney asks.

 

 

In hindsight, Sidney can’t believe he didn’t see it coming.

 

 

Zhenya’s got a picture of a little boy taped to her mirror in the workroom. The picture is a little worn, bent around the edges, well-loved.

“Good luck charm?” Sidney asks from one chair over, watching Zhenya drag two fingers over the face before sitting down to glue her eyebrows up. Sidney has his own, of course, as does everyone. He’s carried his superstitious rituals over from hockey, has everything arranged around his mirror with a certain place like a summoning circle.

“Sort of,” Zhenya replies. “My son. Remind me of why I come here.”

The brush Sidney is using to blend almost falls out of his hand. “You have a son?”

Sidney’s own parents don’t even know he does drag. He’s not sure what will happen when this season airs. His mom was put down as an emergency contact, and he signed a few confidentiality waivers that said production could at any time inform his family of his appearance on the show, but that’s how involved any of them are with his life at this point. His dad still thinks he’s working on his graduate degree.

Zhenya has looked so hard and focused in the brief time that Sidney has known her that he feels the wind knocked out of him hard when she looks at him in the mirror and smiles with an earnest ease. When Zhenya looks at him it feels like they’re the only two in the room, like there’s no other competition, no camera crew, no production team whispering into their headsets and pulling strings.

“Yeah,” Zhenya says. “His name Nikita.”

“Wow,” Sidney replies, and he tries to breathe normally and finish blending in his bronzer. “How old is he?”

“Too old,” Zhenya replies. “This picture old. I leave Russia years ago and he get too big without me.”

Sidney’s always wanted kids, somewhere at his core. He’s wanted a family. There are so many things he’s not sure if he wants to have or do at this point in his life, but a family and kids are a definite. “I’ve always wanted a kid. But I didn’t think it was a possibility.”

Zhenya hums and looks amused, closing one eye and swiping at her brows aggressively with the glue stick. “Many things possible, Hatricia.”

“Sidney,” Sidney replies. “Uh, Sid. You can call me Sid.”

“Oh. Well, Sid,” Zhenya tries again. “You not know unless you try, right? Anything possible. Children possible. Living your dreams possible. I move to New York and drag queens tell me not enough duct tape in the world for me to get good tuck, tell me that impossible. I prove them wrong.”

“Your tuck is amazing,” Sidney says, because it’s true, because when he saw Zhenya out of drag for the first time yesterday morning walking around the workroom with his dick hanging out, Sidney took in the length and girth of it and decided first of all, that was how he wanted to die, and second of all, being able to make that disappear was nothing short of magic. Zhenya is fucking huge.

Zhenya laughs. “It is. I am. But not easy. You have to try, make look easy.”

He’s not wrong. Sidney sets down his brush. “Thank you, Zhenya.”

Zhenya smiles back at him. “Call me Geno.”

 

 

Sidney’s room is in the middle of the rented out hotel block where they’re all staying, so it becomes routine for everyone to start sneaking over to Sidney’s room for drinks and hockey after shooting wraps for the day. Eventually Jamie and Sequins figure out what’s going on and join in after Tanger eats shit jumping over from Jamie’s balcony and cusses loud enough that everyone already in Sid’s room hides in the closet behind a wall of silk and chiffon ballgowns just in case the producers heard and come by to check up on him.

It’s nice, a group of strangers settling into a family made of fake eyelashes and beer breath, conversations about whether Nicky’s cheeks are real or where Sasha finds designer shoes that fit her fucking horse hooves in between yelling at the TV, shoving each other in the shoulders and off the bed.

After a musical challenge takes its toll on Sidney’s legs, everyone brings over a bucket of ice to fill his bathtub and they take turns sitting on the edge with him, legs calf deep and freezing with the fan going while taking hits of the shag Biz keeps getting from his bellhop sugar daddy. Sidney finds himself talking about himself openly, truths the producers have been trying to pry out like teeth, head resting on Geno’s shoulder, tongue thick. He talks about the hockey player he was supposed to be, the accident, how kids have always been shitty and in the end, being gay was the easy part.

Geno isn’t looking at him when he says so, is looking at his hand curled around an empty can of Bud Light, fingers denting the aluminum in his grip. Sidney suddenly feels foolish, and a burn curls up his ears despite the ice at his calves when Geno stands up.

Sidney expects Geno to say something laced with pity that Sidney can’t bear, but instead he says, “You need new drink? I get you vodka. Vodka better for you, pretty boy. No carbs.”

“Oh okay,” Sidney says. “Thanks.”

“No problem,” Geno replies. “Sid’s ass already too big, I help.”

Sidney swats at him as he goes back out to the hotel room and tries not to swoon.

 

 

After a week and a half, things shift between all of them. A group challenge sends Nicky home, and Sasha blames Geno and Sidney, who he claims threw Nicky under the bus. Sasha stops coming over at night, and Sequins and Jamie start doing their own, unspoken, weird thing one balcony up. The tension permeates into the workroom and the next few challenges seem to take a back seat to Geno and Sasha bickering loudly in Russian, which overshadows two of the quieter girls in the competition getting eliminated. It’s exhausting just being around them as they circle each other, and the challenges are exhausting, and Sidney is exhausted, and it shows when he lands in the bottom two during the Snatch Game.

Sasha looks pleased, her Melania Trump impression netting her the win for the week. Zhenya’s name also gets called out for her successful Khloe Kardashian and her vintage swimwear runway look, and Sidney watches Geno helplessly from the main stage as everyone with a high score is escorted out of the room.

Sidney doesn’t lip sync. It’s not part of Hatricia’s act. He doesn’t lip sync, and he doesn’t dance, and he doesn’t do much outside of time-lapse make-up tutorials and club appearances where he’s had two months advance to wreck a theme. He’s afraid if he tried to do a death drop his limbs would scatter like tinker toys in a nursery. He’s been taken apart and put back together so many times, and he’s so afraid, hates feeling delicate, hates feeling fragile in his big, bulky body. That’s why he started doing drag to begin with, and here he is being haunted by it anyway.

By the time the critiques are over and he goes back to the lounge where the other queens are waiting, Sidney’s all sharp, hard edges, hidden away and numb under padding and make-up, waiting for the inevitable call back to earn his spot in a lip sync battle. The girls are spread out on couches with their complimentary drinks except for Zhenya, who is spread out on her own couch with two drinks. Sidney watches Zhenya lean up on a shoulder and slide her cork wedges back to make room and lift both drinks, so that’s where Sidney goes to sit.

“You get some liquid courage,” Zhenya says when Sidney sits down, crossing her ankles. One of the critiques outside of Sidney’s disastrous snatch game had been the choice to wear vintage jellies with nude pantyhose for a beachwear look. The judging panel had said to go full nude, and Sidney had looked to the ceiling for answers on how to deal with railroad track scars and the mottled patchwork quilt of soft scar tissue skin without the protective layer of nylon to cover any of it. There’s being naked and then there’s what lies underneath.

“I’ve got one,” Sidney says, holding up her own drink, but Zhenya presses the two she has up to Sidney’s catnip colored lips.

“You need more for this,” Zhenya replies, and Sidney rolls her eyes and allows all three straws in her mouth, taking eight big sips of what tastes like vodka with red food coloring until the glasses are nothing but ice.

“Thanks,” Sidney says, and Zhenya traces a well-manicured thumb underneath her lip to wipe at the trickle spilling from the corner of her mouth. The room has gone quiet, and everyone is looking at them.

“Dang, Tricks, thirsty?” Biz finally asks, reclining with her own drink in the most judgemental way possible; all big shoulders arched over her glass, eyebrow raised.

“Yeah,” Sidney replies, because she’s going home. She knows she’s going home. She can’t dance, and her charisma is reliant on instagram filters and excessive angles, and is nowhere to be found here in this pool of talent and spirit and the unbridled confidence that all these girls have because they fucking know themselves. Sidney doesn’t know who Hatricia is beyond a picture with a few thousand likes online. Hashtag: Identity Crisis, she thinks. Hashtag: This Sucks.

“You win, we drink more. Celebrate,” Zhenya says. They’re not really supposed to allude to the fact they sneak around behind the producer’s backs to drink and party and talk and be stupid boys, but at this point Sidney doesn’t really care because she’s on her way out anyway.

“Oh,” she says, voice a paper ball curling into a fist. “I don’t know about that. Maybe pour one out for me when I’m gone, eh?”

The room kind of erupts. Sidney almost feels bad for the other two girls in the bottom, because everyone is so sure one of them is going home instead. Even Sasha takes off a five inch peep-toe stiletto and shakes it saying, “if you go home early, Hatricia, I actually kill you.”

The song the bottom two are supposed to perform to is Robyn’s “Fembot,” and the three up for the elimination lip sync are supposed to familiarize themselves with it and build a routine before going into the battle round. Sidney doesn’t even know where to start, shrugging off the rest of the girls to go stand by the mirrors and fumble with a tangled pair of headphones while Miley Virus stretchers her leg above her head against the wall.

Sidney doesn’t expect Zhenya to come over. Or maybe she does. She doesn’t really know at this point.

“What you do?” Zhenya asks. “You know song already?”

“Yeah,” Sidney admits. He started practicing the lyrics last night after everyone went to bed, because deep down he kind of already knew he was going to be in the bottom.

“Then you be fine,” Zhenya says. She’s pushed her vintage Jackie O shades pushed up over her bangs so Sidney can see her droopy, beautiful, dumb eyes all earnest and serious behind her mink eyelashes.

“I can’t dance, G,” Sidney says, then, “Zhenya.”

Zhenya rolls her eyes, like, what the fuck ever, okay. Sidney hears it without it ever leaving her mouth. “It lip sync challenge. You know the words? You have pretty mouth? You good.”

“You think I have a pretty mouth?” Sidney repeats, and it kind of comes out more flirtatious than intended because he’s smiling, but whatever. He’s going home. Between Zhenya and his inevitable elimination, the heat death of the universe, he could give a fuck.

“Many pretty things, Hatricia Tricks,” Zhenya says. “Pretty mouth sing along. Pretty ass shake. You okay.”

Zhenya spanks Sidney on the thigh, not the ass; a strange, thin line, and she rolls her head back with the rest of herself, resting on her palms and taking in Sidney like a sunset.

“Michelle says I need to stop relying on pretty and get my shit together,” Sidney replies.

Zhenya just hums, looks Sidney up and down. Words seem to be caught in her throat, whether or not she knows how to say them in a way that will translate, or maybe she knows what she wants to say but only wants Sidney to hear. Her pout is so pronounced right now, and Sidney wants to touch her fat bottom lip the same way Zhenya touched her earlier, but just out of sure desire to feel and admire and worship. She’s beautiful.

“You get your shit together,” Zhenya says, dismissive like Sidney’s already got his shit together. Sidney looks down to see her seafoam green toenails pop from the cork wedges trace up the curve of his his calf. “Don’t go home to some second-rate queen.”

“She’s not--” Sidney tries, but Zhenya puts a finger to his lips.

“When you lose,” she says, “you only lose to me when I win.”

 

 

So Sidney at the very least has an ass in his arsenal, and he knows how to fucking shake it. He’s got that, and he has the lyrics, and when he tries to internalize them--take all the pieces that make him Hatricia Tricks and repurpose them into this sex robot--it isn’t much different.

She’s got a scallop lace cape from the challenge that she’s repurposed as a weapon, wielding cloth in her fist as she takes a wide-legged stance. Sidney was born a competitive person, but it’s been trained out of him through the years through broken bones and spit in his face. This is the first time the competitive flame in her heart has roared old and familiar, thanks to Zhenya’s tough talk through pursed lips, her vodka and fingertips lingering right where Sidney’s bikini ended and skin began.

Is his story supposed to be that he’s broken? Is that all people think Hatricia is? Well, she thinks, and Zhenya blows her a kiss over her shoulder. She’s gonna have to prove them wrong.

Sidney’s performance is all sludgy and sharp at once, like Hatricia is trying to reboot herself to no avail. And then all of a sudden she’s smooth, a series of circuits and fake tits and a streamlined silhouette. She thinks about the way Geno’s fish mouth would look gaping over her nipples, wet and sloppy; she thinks, where would you touch me? and drags her hands down in those places to a rhythm, nails making an uneven fissure in her pantyhose, scars exposed as she traces up her chest, her neck through the shield of her robe.

She wins, somehow. Sidney wins. She watches another queen walk away and afterwards Zhenya holds her by the face and presses their foreheads together saying, “I know, I know,” and then it’s Geno in his room laid out in a white wifebeater and basketball shorts like another person entirely resting his head on Sidney’s shoulder while they watch highlights on Sportscenter.

 

 

“What do you think of Zhenya?” the producers ask.

Sidney isn’t stupid. He knows they want some kind of narrative, maybe another rivalry, maybe something mean or something they can take out of context. He bites a nail and looks off-camera to a particularly dull corner of the room. “Beautiful. Fun. The one to beat.”

(Sidney is maybe a little stupid.)

 

 

“Tricks, smoke break,” Flower says, tugging Sidney by the arm when he’s hot gluing rhinestones to a naked body suit. Sidney almost gets glue over his knuckles and trips off the stool over himself.

“I don’t smoke,” Sidney says dumbly, and he’s pretty sure everyone involved in the entire production knows that, but allows Flower to pull him out of the workroom anyway.

“Yeah, no shit,” Flower says, taking out a pack of Camel Lights and handing one to Sidney anyway. Sidney reluctantly lights it when they get outside and lets it hang out of the corner of the mouth and greets the foreign burn with a wince. “I’m just trying to talk to you off camera.”

“Oh,” Sidney says.

“Yeah,” Flower replies. “Anyway, are you and Zhenya fucking?”

The cigarette almost drops from his lips and he chokes on the smoke like an amateur. “What? I mean, when would we even find time--”

“ _That’s_ the issue,” Flower says, unimpressed.

“Well, fuck, I dunno! We haven’t talked about it or anything, but yeah, you guys are always in my room, and it’s not like I’m gonna just suck his dick under a workbench while we’re here.”

“I would,” Flower supplies, and rolls his eyes when Sidney manages to look offended, like he has any reason to. “And we’re not always in your room.”

“You’re there--you’re there a lot,” Sidney says. It’s not like he minds, even if he really, really wants to fuck Zhenya. He would still have to ask Zhenya first, and that too would require privacy and Zhenya to want to fuck Sidney back, and probably a conversation about feelings that would take more than five minutes. “Maybe sneak into Biz’s room sometime, give her and that bellhop a break.”

“Oh, and stop Biz from getting us free weed? It’s either your place or I break off with Sequins and Bennett-Ramsay when they leave to sixty-nine each other over their Texas beauty pageant bullshit aesthetic.”

“There’s Ruby Roux,” Sidney suggests, but only as a joke. The first thing out of Ruby’s mouth after she walked into the workroom was something shady about how Hatricia ignored her three years ago at a club, and she’s constantly been trying to pick fights since. If Ruby Roux were eliminated yesterday it would be too soon.

“Pass,” Flower replies. “That girl is bad juju, and I don’t want to know what kind of black magic she gets up to in her own room. I bet she has a voodoo doll of you.”

“Shut up,” Sidney says, and he’s trying not to laugh.

“Besides, Tanger’s a babe, and he’s always in your room, and watching whatever is going on between you and Zhenya is cute.”

“There’s nothing going on,” Sidney insists again, and he takes a deep drag of his own cigarette like pressing a seal to a warm set of wax as if to keep anything that might stumble out of his mouth firmly tucked away.

 

 

Sidney really, really wants there to be something going on.

 

 

The judges critique Sidney for his bodysuit, even though no one else gets critiqued for wearing fucking nude bodysuits, and it’s _clearly_ \-- they’re trying to push Sidney into Tragic Backstory Corner, and he doesn’t want to go. But he doesn’t get in the bottom two, so it’s fine, and she thanks God for giving her a sharp eye and hands that can cut down hockey sticks and sharpen skate blades and carve perfect hip padding out of old couch cushions.

But then Zhenya and Sasha are in the bottom two instead, and next to her, Sidney hears Flower say, “it’s way too fucking soon.” Everyone looks confused. They’re not even halfway through filming, and Zhenya and Sasha’s whole deal is that they’re supposed to be bitter rivals to the end. It’s their edit, their story-- everyone knows it, even Sidney, who still doesn’t know what his own fucking story or edit is.

Geno isn’t allowed to go home, Sidney decides suddenly, even if it isn’t his decision to make. And it sucks. If it were anyone else, Sidney would know with absolute certainty that Geno would be staying, but this is Sasha, and at this point Sidney has come to terms that everyone here is fighting for third place, because Geno and Sasha are supposed to be one and two.

It can’t end like this, Sidney thinks, and they take their positions on the center stage in front of him.

It can’t end like this, he thinks, and the music starts to play.

Sasha Dynamo is just what her name implies when the spotlight is on her, all thrashing, wild angles and on her knees to Fifth Harmony’s BO$$, while Zhenya walks the catwalk like an escort high in demand. Eventually she’s walking backwards from Sasha like she’s pulling her on a leash, and Sasha crawls toward her like a dog, and it’s an intense mix of campy, sexy what-the-fuck that leaves the judge panel absolutely gagging.

It’s the kind of performance no one should be sent home for, and Sidney is so angry watching them, because he wants to want it as bad as they do, he wants so fucking much, and--

A producer comes forward and speaks with the panel of judges, leaving Sasha and Zhenya on the front stage in limbo, sweat cooling on their backs, bodies heaving. More producers come in and all of them are speaking in hushed voices now, and then a PA comes to take all of the girls backstage, although without the formality of knowing who and what the judges are deliberating.

Zhenya is roughly seven feet in the heels she’s wearing, and she still looks small up close post-performance, and next to her, Sasha looks three stories tall and ready to start throwing set pieces if someone doesn’t explain exactly what the fuck is going on. Sidney stays the fuck out of her way, curling a finger into the ruching of Zhenya’s bodice instead, and doesn’t care about the cameras when Zhenya leans down and presses a nervous kiss into the crown of her wig.

“So, obviously this means that neither of you are going home, right?” Flower says, an eternal buoy of optimism. “Because you bitches kind of slayed the house down.”

“Well, one of them has to go home,” Ruby Roux says, and Biz says, “Roux, please kindly shut the fuck up.”

After what feels like a century, they’re all escorted back on set and into their positions by some of the production staff. On stage it feels like no one is breathing. Flower grabs Sidney’s hand and holds it so hard Sidney thinks it’s going to break, and his only instinct is to squeeze back harder.

Zhenya and Sasha step forward. They grasp each other’s hands and squeeze tight, close their eyes.

Biz gets called up and sent home.

The girls gasp.

“What the fuck?” someone says, and Sidney can’t even identify who, because the blood is pounding so hard in his ears.

On camera, it is revealed that producers know that Biz has broken the rules of the competition and must be sent home. Backstage, afterwards, it is revealed that the producers have known for an extended period of time that Biz violated his contract by sucking dick for weed at the hotel, and they’ve been ominously waiting for the right moment to eliminate him. They don’t say that they’re aware the rest of the cast has been smoking and drinking and sneaking around at night, but it’s heavily implied.

“We probably shouldn’t be doing this,” Jamie Bennett-Ramsay says later, hanging uncomfortably at the sliding door to Sidney’s balcony with his arms folded. It’s been awhile since he and Sequins have shown up, and even Sasha is here, looking like he aged twenty years in the past twelve hours. The only person still on the show who isn’t in Sidney’s room is Ruby Roux, because fuck her, seriously.

“Yeah? What if they have fucking cameras in all our rooms,” Flower says, looking like he needs a cigarette. The way Bennett-Ramsay and Sequins blanche speaks volumes about why they’ve been having exclusive hang-outs one room up and three to the right. Sidney doesn’t have any right to judge though, because even if he wants to suck Geno’s dick, he hasn’t, but he has been harboring four-to-six other contestants every night to watch hockey or ESPN or just hotbox his shower and talk about Gay Shit.

“Then maybe we don’t do this anymore,” Sidney says. He doesn’t look at Geno. He doesn’t look at anyone.

Okay, he maybe he looks at Sasha, who flips him off and laughs a little before flopping onto Sidney’s bed and stretching his arms over his head. God, Sidney hates her so much.

The last night of filming they spend as a forged-together drag family comes to an end before midnight. Call is at six the next morning, and no one has settled back into their own skin with the revelation that the producers probably know every secret they thought they were so expertly hiding. Geno is the last one out of Sidney’s room.

“I miss this,” he says, taking Sidney’s face in his hands. It’s soft from the exfoliating mask Sid just took off and rinsed away ten minutes ago.

“I’ll miss this too,” Sidney replies, leaning into his big, warm palm. “I feel like everyone getting together every night is the only thing that’s kept me sane.”

Geno’s fingers curl down his cheek, knuckles hesitating at the corner of Sidney’s mouth. Whatever he’s about to say, he pinches between his teeth with the inside of his lip. He looks sad and fond, and it makes Sidney want to go to his knees. Sidney thinks about what his skin would taste like, what his mouth would feel like wet and warm and open against Geno’s shoulder.

Instead Sidney says, “Goodnight, Geno.”

And Geno says, “Goodnight, Sid.”

 

 

Flower goes home, and then Tanger goes home, and then Sidney feels like he has no one. He has Geno, but he doesn’t _have_ Geno, and that deep divide between them is tangible and awkward and more awful than if they hated each other like Ruby Roux hates Sidney.

Ruby Roux goes home in a lip sync battle to Sidney after a live interview broadcast with Patrick Burke goes bad for both of them. Ruby writes _Bye, Hatricia_ on the workroom mirror in lipstick as a parting message, and Sidney rubs it away with wet wipes and a sense of vindication.

Sidney isn’t going to go home. She’s going to win just out of spite, she decides. It’s a motivator not unlike Zhenya’s hands cupping her face, stoking the same competitive fire that’s always burned ugly and raw and indefinite at her core; the one she’s ignored for so long and tamped down until now, coming back up with the full force of fifteen forgotten years.

The next challenge is a TV pilot challenge, and Sidney gets paired with Zhenya. They come up with the a sixties Twilight Zone-esque Drag Two-Headed Monster from Outer Space and somehow win against Sasha’s stupid Oprah concept and Jamie and Sequin’s Dallas-esque soap pilot. Winning with Zhenya leads to the hours of footage of them alone in the untucked lounge without the others, sitting too close and Sidney letting Zhenya’s too-long nails tease the tulle hem of his dress until the others slowly trail in after initial deliberations.

Sidney is so fucking in love with Zhenya. With Geno. With every single character Geno embodies and every identity outside of that, quiet and soft and stoic, dark eyes and callused knuckles, fuck! Sidney hates it, and Sidney hates the sudden, awful nights alone. It’s defined in the strict hours they’re allowed to spend together, where Zhenya complements every aspect of Hatricia Tricks, where Sidney feels Geno’s absence on his bed in the long, lonely nights where they used to throw ice cubes at the NBC announcers on TV and talk about the shitty guys they used to date.

Sequins goes home after Ruby Roux, and then it’s a jewel ball where they have to create three looks inspired by fake diamonds or whatever-the-fuck, and Zhenya and Sasha are in trouble again, along with Sidney, except then they get the song the night before for the lip sync and it’s t.A.t.u’s “Malchik Gay” and Sidney knows he isn’t going to be up for elimination. Sidney knows he’s going to be going to the finale as one of the top three, and they’re forcing Zhenya and Sasha’s story to be tied up nice and neat right here.

Geno is pissed. Rightfully so. Sasha is pissed too, but Sidney kind of, sort of doesn’t give a fuck about her-- his entire world is either beating Zhenya or losing to Zhenya, and there is no finale that satisfies Sidney outside of that, and it feels like everyone is being cheated. It feels like what happened with Biz all over again, production omniscience overriding their efforts for the sake of a forced story.

Geno looks tired when they arrive at the studio the next morning.

“Up late?” Sidney tries to be conversational, leaning into his space as they get ready for the final runway and lip sync. Geno doesn’t look away from his reflection as he beats his face, but he also doesn’t move away.

“What is sleep,” Geno replies, hiding the dark circles under his eyes with three inches of foundation.

Both Zhenya and Sasha bring everything to the runway. Zhenya is in a backless rhinestone slip that looks like chainmail, like armor that hardly makes it down her thigh and slinks around her bronzed-on cleavage. Sasha has a custom ruby-inspired bodice with a red tulle skirt that makes her look ready for the Bolshoi. Their silhouettes are curvy and their nails are sharp, ready to kill. Neither of them should be going home.

Both of them are still up for elimination. Both of them are called forward for the lip sync, bodies heaving and hungry for the win.

Halfway through the song, Zhenya’s dress unfolds into a slinky gold sequin skirt that leaves her chest bare. Sasha’s dress pulls up through the corset and reveals a bedazzled flag of Russia when undone, which she proceeds to wrap herself in and fall to the stage, thrusting up sluggish and suggestive.

Sasha wins.

Sidney can’t fucking breathe. Neither can Zhenya, it seems, whose instinct is to bend over her knees when it’s announced that she’s supposed to sashay away. Sidney watches helplessly as Zhenya’s shoulders flex involuntarily and sharp, watches Zhenya grip her head in her hands and greet the ugly wave of defeat.

They were supposed to make it to the final together, Sidney thinks. Zhenya was the one who made Sidney feel like someone to beat. Sidney had maybe thought he was an asterisk or a footnote in the competition, but Zhenya was the one who drove into her competitive edge and sparked it back to life. She shouldn’t be allowed to leave when Sidney stays. She shouldn’t be allowed to leave when Sasha, who has done nothing but taunt and parade and ooze over furniture throughout the competition, is allowed to continue. It doesn’t make sense.

“This doesn’t make sense,” Sidney says, dumbstruck when Zhenya holds his face in her warm, huge palms as she says goodbye. It’s all he can think of saying, and he needs to say something, otherwise his mouth is going to do other, stupid, awful things like kiss Zhenya.

Sidney really, really wants to kiss Zhenya.

And God, Zhenya’s eyes are crescent moons when she tries not to cry and tries to hide the way she feels about leaving, and she looks at Sidney with such sincerity that Sidney feels like Zhenya wants to kiss her too.

And then she’s gone. She’s left the stage. Let the music play, they say, and Die Tomorrow comes on, and they’re supposed to dance down the runway like they’re happy that they’re here and Zhenya isn’t. Zhenya is backstage right now, writing a goodbye message on a mirror in lipstick and dressing down into Geno and packing all of herself away into four suitcases, and it fills Sidney with a worse desperation than being in the bottom two did. How does he qualify it? He wanted Zhenya to kiss him goodbye, maybe, at the very least. He’d expected it. He’s supposed to dance right now and celebrate being here, and he would rather be with Zhenya instead. He wants to be with Geno. He wishes he got a kiss goodbye. He wishes if someone were here to beat him, it would be Geno.

 

 

The message on the mirror reads _TEAM HATRICIA, SASHA GO HOME_. Sasha wipes it off with a Neutrogena wipe. Sidney wishes she could cut it out and frame it forever.

 

 

“How do you feel about Zhenya not making the final three? You two were clearly very close,” a producer is saying.

“The wrong person went home,” Sidney says, tired, fighting off the urge to tell the crew to get fucked. He can’t look at any of them. “It’s not going to be much of a finale without her.”

 

 

They don’t get back to the hotel until around two in the morning, and Sidney feels like he hasn’t slept for a thousand years. Production keeps taking longer and longer as the cast gets smaller and smaller. The nights where they were back by six with room service, eight boys fighting for space on Sidney’s bed to watch sports are long gone. Sidney feels as empty as he’s ever been, now that he knows what could have been there this entire time--friends, a family, girls who know his weaknesses and love him anyway. _Love_. Zhenya. Fuck.

Sasha actually puts a hand on his back in the elevator. “Hey,” he says. “Sorry.”

“Bite me,” Sidney says, because apologies can wait, and if Sasha feels this way six months from now she can write it in a fucking letter.

He wishes he could slam his hotel door on Sasha and Jamie’s backs, like an exclamation point at the end of an angry sentence, but the fucking things have hydraulic hinges, so there’s no satisfaction in watching Sasha’s mean, tight-lipped smile walk past as he steps into his room. The door closes with a slow, uncomfortable hiss.

“Hey,” Geno says from Sidney’s bed, and Sidney almost has a heart attack.

“Geno,” Sidney says stupidly in lieu of dying from shock, hand against his chest. Geno’s face is still shiny from make-up remover and whatever incredible skin care regimen that makes him glow like a goddamn solar flare.

“Producers give me until four, flight leave for New York at eight,” Geno says. His arms are behind his head, casual and careful. His long, slender legs reach the edge of the bed, heels tucked into the quilted curve of the comforter. He’s turned the TV on. “I pack fast.”

“So you can say goodbye to everyone?” Sidney asks. It’s typical to leave a piece of notebook paper to the girls you become close with when you’re eliminated; Tanger and Flower both left personal messages for Sidney when they left along with their phone numbers. Geno hadn’t left shit, and it had stung in the moment.

“So I can say proper goodbye to you,” Geno replies. He looks tired, eyes swollen like maybe he was crying. But his eyes always look like that, sunken and sad and beautiful. He drags a hand down from his head to the bedspread next to him and pats it like an invitation. “Just you.”

“Just me?” Sidney asks. He looks at Geno’s hand, flexed on the bedspread. He looks at Geno’s earnest eyes, his thinning hairline, the wrinkles in his forehead when he smiles and the dimple in his cheek, crooked.

“Sid, don’t be dumb,” Geno almost whines, and he looks tortured as he tears his gaze away to stare at the ceiling in prayer. “It take everything not to kiss you goodbye tonight.”

“Oh,” Sidney says, and it feels good. It’s a weird, awful relief, like the pull of having a drip removed. “I wanted you to.”

“I know.” Geno rolls his eyes. “But it not so easy, you know? Everyone want us to be story. We kiss, I kiss you, then it just TV moment, not our moment. Want more than that with you-- want it to be _real_.”

“Oh,” Sidney says again, feeling stupid, still standing there with his hands at his sides like an idiot.

“Besides, I kiss you, then what? People just remember you as Zhenya’s love interest, forget your name by time finale airs.

“Well, that’s pretty fucking cocky,” Sidney replies, and he crawls onto the bed then, accepting it for the challenge it is. “I don’t even get my own story?”

“Of course you do,” Geno says honestly, softly, so sincere it hurts. “Your story is best.”

And then he leans forward, pressing his soft, soft mouth against Sidney’s own. The moment feels framed and hung on a wall in Sidney’s heart as it happens, so deeply wanted that he can’t find words or feelings for it. He ends up crawling the short distance between their bodies on his knuckles to eventually find Geno’s face with his own hands while their mouths are still together and keep them there.

“I thought,” he says into Geno’s mouth, “I thought.”

“Don’t think, Sid,” Geno replies, eyes still closed, mouth wet. “So bad at thinking, just kiss.”

“Fuck you,” Sidney replies, but he does shut up for what it’s worth and just keeps kissing Geno, keeps crawling so he’s got a leg over Geno and is straddling his thighs.

“On first date?” Geno asks, but his thumbs are already sliding up from Sidney’s knees toward his dick. “You so easy, Sid.”

“How many times have you snuck into my room?” Sidney asks, pulling away and swiping a palm over Geno’s mouth when he tries to follow. “This has been--this is like, if we’re counting, this might as well be date number twenty. Date fifty. I don’t know. I’m not easy.”

“Fine, not easy,” Geno complies, even easier. “Please keep kissing?”

“You’re terrible,” Sidney replies, and then kisses him so hard their teeth knock together as Geno’s head hits the wall. He rolls his hips up against Geno’s suggestively, and Geno takes the bait, palms coming around to grab each cheek of Sidney’s ass and pull him as close as possible, and Sidney’s breath shudders out on the exhale.

They’re not going to fuck, at least not tonight. Sidney didn’t think there would be time or an opportunity or even a person he would want to fuck while he was here, much less turn into a lovesick idiot around, so he didn’t think to bring condoms or lube. He’s mostly been jerking his way through a series of small hotel lotion bottles. Between all of the contestants on the show staying in the same hotel block, he’s sure they’ve all cost Hilton a modest fortune in lotion through lonely nights.

This is nice though. Geno touches him experimentally, and it feels like his freshman year at college all over again, thoughtful and hungry and every action driven by raw, urgent need. Geno makes him feel so young, younger than he's maybe ever allowed himself to be. Sidney rolls his hips with a little less finesse than usual, weeks of wanting to get on his knees for Geno bleeding out of him until his thighs are shaking. Geno isn’t helping, big hands running down the backs of Sidney’s legs from his ass, pinching and kneading at the thick muscle and fat there.

“What you want?” Geno asks, pulling back. Sidney immediately fixates on his mouth, wet and so swollen already from kissing his lips are like Ruby Roux’s, injected with a thousand fillers. He looks so stupid and soft and in that moment, Sidney wants anything, everything, Geno’s mouth on his neck and three fingers up his ass and a pink stucco apartment off of Santa Monica boulevard where he wakes up next to Geno and kisses the morning stink straight out of his breath. It’s scary to look at someone and want so much.

It’s good to want something so badly it scares him again, Sidney decides.

“Kiss me,” Sidney says, and Geno moves forward again, but Sidney stops him with an, “uh,” and then struggles as he tries to roll his own t-shirt off, murmuring through the cotton, “just a sec.”

He flings it to the side of the bed when it’s finally off, and Geno is right there and ready, and Sidney leans back and points to his clavicle and says, “uh, here,” and Geno complies, sweet and earnest, eyes closed as he presses his mouth to the sharp jut of bone right above Sidney’s heart.

“Just here?” Geno asks, teasing. His hands have drifted up to Sidney’s bare chest, rough fingertips ghosting over his nipples.

“And uh,” Sidney says, lifting his chin. Geno takes the hint, moving up to kiss the long line of Sidney’s neck, sucking perfect stitches right up to his ear, where his teeth catch and his breath is hot and wet. Sidney can’t help the way he shifts in Geno’s lap, grinding in needily. His own dick is fat and obvious in the sweats he wore back from the studio, and Geno hums, taking a break from teasing Sidney’s nipples to wrap his arms around and gather Sidney up, reel him in as close as he can get.

Geno’s dick is diamonds underneath him, and Sidney lets a sloppy, ugly noise slip out of his mouth as he imagines what he’s feeling buried deep, deep inside him, and Geno whispers in his ear, “where you want me to kiss now, Sid?”

“Surprise me,” Sidney replies, because that’s what Geno does best.

“Mmm, okay,” Geno hums again, teeth catching on Sidney’s earlobe in a stupid, sexy way that makes Sidney’s toes curl, “I’m surprise.”

He’s so gentle as he leans Sidney back with their hips still slotted together, as if Sidney isn’t almost six feet and more steel than bone at this point, muscle twisting around posts and pins like a car wreck. Their chests are together, Geno heavy on top of him and sweating through his own shirt that’s also sticking to Sidney’s bare chest, and it’s started to roll up so Sidney can feel the slim patch of hair at his belly. Geno presses one more achingly wet kiss into his mouth and then starts to crawl down his body.

His mouth is around one of Sidney’s nipples in an instant, and Sidney thrusts awkwardly up into his stomach with the slick heat of Geno’s tongue curling, teeth grazing, mouth nursing. For something so small, it makes Sidney feel hot all over, molten and ready to drip over the edge of the bed from his fingertips in heavy ropes.

“Huh,” Sidney says, because anything else that comes out of his mouth right now is going to be completely embarrassing and awful. Geno smoothes his hands down Sidney’s sides and all Sidney can do in return is fist at his hair, pull needily, fumbling and horny like a teenager.

Geno keeps moving down, bites at his ribs, sucks a kiss into his soft stomach.

Sidney, feeling conflicted, says, “you shouldn’t.”

“Shouldn’t?” Geno repeats, and his tongue traces up Sidney’s pelvic bone sweet and innocent. “What you mean?”

“Blowing me,” Sidney says, feeling stupid, his dick twitching and leaking despite himself. “We gotta--be safe.”

“Oh, I’m safe,” Geno replies, and he maybe laughs into Sidney’s thigh.

“I know.” Sidney wants to hold Geno’s face in his hand when he says it, wants to assure him of a thousand things, including forever. “I’m probably--It’s not--Hey, I like you?”

“What?” Geno has the decency to pretend and act surprised.

“Shut up,” Sidney replies. “I like you.”

“Okay,” Geno says, and he looks up from between Sidney’s thighs like he’s trying earnestly to mirror how serious Sidney is.

“In the future I want to, uh,” Sidney continues stupidly, hand drawing up the hard, weird lines of Geno’s face and tugging at his hair gently, “you know, with you.”

“Sid, I’m speak English, but not quite understand what you say just now,” Geno says. He shaved this afternoon right before he did his face, but his stubble is already coming back in, scratchy against Sidney’s thigh.

“Fuck,” Sidney says. “I like you. Can we date? Or something. Shit.”

“We talk about this now?” Geno asks. His mouth is so, so swollen, carelessly red around the edges.

“No, I mean,” Sidney says, still somehow miraculously hard, because maybe he gets off on being a disaster. “Yes. I don’t know. I just--I want you to blow me, but not now, because I haven’t been tested in like, months, and I don’t have condoms, and I’m sure you’re fine, but like--”

“Sid,” Geno interrupts him, and kisses his thigh and grabs his junk through his sweats in a way that isn’t very nice, but feels incredibly good. “I’m not blow you now. Just jerk you off. Try to tease, but maybe you don’t like?”

“No, I like,” Sidney replies, feeling extra stupid now. “I like it a lot.”

“Okay, so I tease you, jerk you off, we go home, you win, we date, we fuck, whatever,” Geno says, and it sounds so easy. It sounds like he’s thought about it. Has he thought about it? God, Sidney dreams. There’s a lot to unpack there.

But of course he gets hung up on the wrong part and says, “you think I’m gonna win?”

“Yeah,” Geno replies, and he rolls Sidney’s sweats back with his briefs in one smooth movement and Sidney’s cock springs up, and Geno said he wasn’t going to blow him, but he does press a hot kiss to the shaft before gripping Sidney there tight. “You better.”

 

 

It’s so shitty and weird trying to shove all of his worst outfits and side-projects and abandoned wig experiments into a series of trunks and boxes halfway up the attic the first time Geno comes to visit. Sidney is there to greet him at LAX, hands shoved deep into his pockets and cap lip dipped under his nose. Geno kisses him anyway, kisses his forehead through his cap, kisses the weak spot at his jugular, pushes Sidney away with his palms and then dives in with his mouth to kiss the crease of his armpit, like that’s what he missed the most.

(“It was,” Geno confirms later. He’s wearing low-slung basketball shorts and an unzipped hoodie over a crop top, and Sidney wants to die and be reborn right there in the parking garage. “Smell like you. Miss it most.”)

Sidney rents a house with three other girls from the circuit, and it’s not unusual to have a revolving door of boys and girls on their living room couch, in their kitchen or bathtub all hungover and kind. Jeff has had a boyfriend for like, a thousand years, so it’s almost like Sidney lives with four people and two of them just cheat on rent like assholes. Bringing in a temporary guest, or even a semi-permanent fifth wouldn’t make much of a difference from the clusterfuck that has assimilated all living areas and begun to creep into the kitchen.

Zhenya comes and co-hosts a live feed of the show at the Orpheum and he lets Sidney jerk off on his fake feather lashes in the green room, gasping and leaving a greasy palm print on the mirror. Then he stays another two days in Sidney’s bed demanding nothing but take-out and only asquesces to Yoko Oko-esque interviews for WOW! Presents where he holds the sheets up past his nipples and plays coy about his future like he didn’t whisper weird Russian promises into the hair that collects at Sidney’s shoulder-blades earlier in the morning when they were fucking messy and slow.

The hard part isn’t having Geno come to stay. The hard part is realizing how easy Geno fits a number of holes Sidney didn’t knew existed, and then watching him leave.

Sidney kisses Geno goodbye at the airport, lurking while he passes through security, and then three weeks later heads out to Brighton Beach. Geno wraps around him like a venus fly trap at JFK and kisses him, kisses him, kisses him, wet and sloppy all over his neck and up to his mouth.

“Gonna show you best time,” he says, and Sidney isn’t sure when he’s joking when he says, “Sasha give you any trouble and we take him out, no problem, only old man bars and Nicky miss him.”

“We aren’t murdering Alex,” Sidney says anyway, but he’s smiling. He packed a lot lighter for this trip than Geno did coming to Los Angeles; just two suitcases, a few prime wigs, a gown and maybe a surprise slinky number he can keep wear to keep up with Zhenya.

Flower and Tanger come down from Montreal where they’ve been doing a two-woman weekly show, and make a lot of mean but approving noises when they arrive at Geno’s shoebox apartment. They don’t comment on the same picture of Nikita that Geno had taped to his mirror during filming that’s been smoothed out at her work station at home, or the fact that it’s the only picture of Nikita that Geno seems to have. Sidney had asked and Geno had waved a hand, said something like, “you know, Russia, too dangerous for him to know I’m exist, I’m here. His mama is good mama, very protective. Maybe when he’s old enough, wants to see me, I hope he comes find me. Need new picture for mirror.” He’d tried to sound joking, but the weight of the room seemed to sink with a heavy sadness, and Sidney wanted nothing more in the world to make that happen; maybe he could be the one holding up a camera years in the future, taking a picture of the two of them together. In the now he can at least take a selfie of him, and Flower, and Tanger, and Zhenya and put it on Instagram, hashtag: family.

They all take an Uber to the bar Zhenya’s been hosting her own series watch parties at. She’s got posters taped up outside with her face on them, but for this event she’s got Hatricia and Flower and Tangerine too, along with Sasha and Nicky, who greet them with warm hugs instead of the _West Side Story_ brawl that Sid kind of expects.

“Quite the reunion, eh?” Sidney says, trying to keep the mood light. Nicky looks like he’s about to press his cigarette out between Sid’s eyes, smiles at him, and goes inside.

“She’s gonna kick your ass at the real reunion, don’t worry,” Sasha says, punching him on the shoulder, before following Nicky up the stairwell and into the dark, neon-lit club.

They’re all seated on stage for the watch party and given microphones to chime in. This bar is seedier than the one that Sidney usually frequents, the floors a little wetter, the bathroom doors busted or non-existent, the drinks much cheaper and more lethal. The crowd is still good though, responsive, loud and drunk, and they tip much better.

The episode airing tonight is still early in the season, number five, and it’s the musical one that gave Sidney shin splints. He hadn’t done poorly, had made it to the top with Jamie and Flower, but he’d been in his own head when they were filming and it shows. His body just couldn’t do the things he wanted it to, and it had sucked, and he had felt so trapped in his skin at the time under so many cameras.

“It suck, you know, seeing her in her own head like that,” Geno says on screen out of drag, scratching idly at his cheek. “I admire so much, she do good job, she have so much talent and I’m always think what can I do so she competing at her best level when I’m supposed to focus on me?”

A producer off-camera says, “sounds like you have a crush.”

“Oh, of course I’m have crush, you joking?” Geno laughs on the screen, and the audience whoops and screams and from across the stage, Zhenya winks at Sid. “Biggest crush, stupid crush, worst crush. Not supposed to have crush, am supposed to win.”

Flower, next to him, says, “I’m so glad you didn’t see this coming. This is hilarious.”

 

 

Geno moves in the week of the finale, which is fucking ridiculous, because he brings like a U-Haul of drag that’s bigger than the apartment he lived in to Sidney’s--to their curb and tries to bring all his stupid dresses and props and kitschy kitchen nick nacks and antique armoire and several frankly hideous statues that they are going to have to vote on democratically as a household whether to throw away or _burn_ , but he also has to go with Sidney to rehearse choreography for the reunion three days in a row, and each of those days winds up with several of them all going out and getting wasted together, namely because Geno and Sasha have a contentious friendship that Sidney will never understand, and he is so happy that an entire country now separates them. And then they have the red carpet the day of the finale, and Geno ruins Sidney’s dress, because it was made to very exact measurements, and you can’t just--you can’t just hike up a very delicate lace mermaid skirt and fuck someone over the sink, Geno--Sidney has fast hands, but he can’t repair that kind of monumental destruction of a garment in four hours, or even forty, so instead he has to pull a completely different look.

Sidney wants to be furious, but he’s too busy being in love and fuck-happy instead. So he fights through his come-fugue and goes to dig out the gold number he made after seeing Rihanna at the Met Gala in 2015; it weighs like, three times as much as he does, but it strips away to something revealing and slightly Vaudevillian he can dance in when necessary, and is absolutely beautiful when it’s not totally inconvenient. The pain is worth it, he tells himself not for the first time in his life.

The red carpet goes by in a blur. He and Geno show up in the same car, and between the events they’ve been seen at together, the WOW! Interview from Sidney’s bed eventually being uploaded a few days ago, the way the show had carefully captured their longing glances at each other, and Geno just straight up saying he wanted to ride Sidney’s dick into the sunset on camera once--everyone kind of loses their shit.

They film the reunion sequence in front of the audience before revealing who between Sasha or Jamie or Sidney won. The last episode they filmed was a music video; Sidney had been in his own head again after Geno had gone home, and Jamie had been too reserved during the filming, so most of the internet has been on Team Sasha. Sidney still has a chance to lip sync for the crown tonight in a last ditch effort for the crown, but he isn’t thinking about that too much. He’s thinking about the upcoming tour he has secured with some of the girls, Geno included, and he’s thinking about how they’re going to arrange the furniture in the house and a series of acts he’s always been too afraid to do, but doesn’t feel so afraid of anymore. He thinks of the way Geno’s dick tastes before he’s showered in the morning, musky and sour, Geno making sleepy noises while Sidney’s under the covers pinning him to the mattress with his mouth.

On stage, Zhenya gets called up for an interview before Sidney, which means that she’s asked first about the nature of their relationship. Naturally, she confirms it, and naturally, she makes it sound like it was entirely her clever plan. But it sort of was. Geno’s been the brave one, until now. When Sidney comes out on stage to join the interview, Zhenya brings him in with two sharp-clawed hands and kisses him on the mouth until both of their faces are just smears of lipstick and Sidney’s tuck has become almost unbearable because Zhenya’s tongue is the worst thing to ever happen to him in his life.

Sidney feels so lit up with affection here on stage, in front of so many cameras and thousands of people, kissing Zhenya. He’s still supposed to compete for the crown tonight, and the hundred-thousand dollar prize, but here or at home or wherever he has Zhenya crawling into his lap, Zhenya’s funny, pretty mouth on his? Sidney feels like a million fucking dollars.

**Author's Note:**

> find me at [twitter](https://twitter.com/dadvansss) / [tumblr](http://dadvans.tumblr.com/)


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